Zancrow saw Noah step out from beside Erza and did what Zancrow apparently did with most things: he laughed.
It was loud, unrestrained, and dripping with contempt from the first syllable.
"Hahahaha! I thought you were actually doing something over there, but all you did was call for a pretty boy! A pretty boy! You think adding one of those to the equation is going to help you beat me? Hehehehehehe!"
The laughter bounced off broken walls and empty doorframes and went nowhere in particular.
Behind Noah, there was a small pause.
"Pretty boy?" Erza said.
"He does look a bit like one, now that you say it out loud," Ultear said, in the tone of someone genuinely considering the question.
Both of them turned to look at Noah with the focused interest of people reassessing something they'd been looking at for years.
Noah closed his eyes briefly.
He was not a pretty boy. He was a person who did not spend his training hours trying to develop the kind of physique that announced itself through clothing, because he had other priorities, and the result was a build that leaned toward lean rather than broad. Years of reading and research had given him something closer to a scholar's bearing than a brawler's. This, apparently, was enough for Zancrow to reach his conclusion.
He decided not to address any part of this out loud and turned to Ultear instead.
"What are we working with?"
Ultear dropped the amusement from her expression without ceremony, shifting into the practical register she used when things mattered.
"Both of them are strong. The blond one uses some kind of black flame magic. Completely different from normal fire. The moment it made contact with my ice, the ice was gone, no resistance at all. The flames are extremely difficult to put out and hit hard." She kept her eyes on the two across the clearing as she spoke. "The big one I haven't seen cast yet, but he's physically strong in a way that isn't normal. He pushed over an entire building without any visible effort or spell."
Noah nodded and looked at them both.
He knew what he was looking at.
Zancrow. Fire God Slayer Magic. A Lost Magic, one of the rarest categories in existence, taught directly to him by Hades, the master of Grimoire Heart. Not Dragon Slayer magic, something above it in the hierarchy it had been built around. The flames of a god rather than a dragon, which translated practically into fire that ate through conventional counter-magic and didn't care what you threw at it. Ultear's ice dissolving on contact was exactly what that magic did.
The large one beside him was Kawazu. His magic was also Lost Magic, a curse-type ability called the Ox-Hour Arrival. Doll-based manipulation at its core, but with a range of applications that made it genuinely unpredictable. Hair from a target embedded in a doll gave control over that target's body. His own hair embedded in a doll gave him control over his own, letting him alter his form, his physical properties, his effective strength and durability. The building comment made immediate sense in that context.
Two Lost Magic users. Both operating at a level that put them above Erza and Ultear's current ceiling, though not dramatically so.
Noah considered this for a moment.
"These two are genuinely strong," he said. "I'm actually feeling some pressure here."
Silence from behind him.
He could feel Erza and Ultear both staring at him with the particular quality of people who had just heard something that did not compute. These were the same two people who had spent the better part of a day being methodically dismantled during the S-Class exam. The gap between what they were capable of and what Noah was capable of was something they had experienced in considerable personal detail. And he was claiming to feel pressured by opponents who were marginally stronger than they were.
Neither of them said anything. There was nothing particularly useful to say.
Across the clearing, Zancrow had caught the tail end of Noah's comment and processed it through whatever filter he used for everything.
"HAHAHAHA! You're at least self-aware enough to know you're outmatched! Then save us all some time and just die already!"
Kawazu, standing at his shoulder, added his agreement in a voice that moved through the words in uneven bursts: "Th-th-then let's just kill them all now and be done with it."
"Exactly." Zancrow's grin spread wider. "Our job was everyone in this city anyway. A few extra Mages don't change the count. Consider it bad luck, hehehehe!"
Black flame erupted from his right hand and he was already moving, crossing the distance between them at a run, all restraint gone.
Noah raised his right hand.
"I didn't actually mean it quite like that, but since you're insisting."
A golden magic circle opened in his palm, clean and precise. Magic power gathered in front of it with a speed and density that changed the quality of the air in the immediate area.
The effect on Zancrow and Kawazu was immediate and visible. Both of them stopped. The laughter cut off. Something shifted in both their expressions at the same moment, the instinctive recognition that the thing in front of them had just crossed a threshold they hadn't expected.
They responded the only way that made sense: everything they had, right now.
Zancrow pulled the fire back from his hand, gathered it inward, and a black magic circle bloomed in front of him, larger than anything he'd produced casually. The flames that poured from it were a different order of magnitude.
"Flame God's Roar!"
A torrent of black fire surged across the distance between them.
At the same moment, Kawazu was already moving through his own process. A doll appeared in his hand, the character for curse visible on its forehead. He pulled a strand of his own hair and pressed it in.
"Doll Material Change: Light Source!"
Light erupted from his body, sudden and total, turning him into something that blazed from every surface. He thrust his palm forward and the light followed the motion outward.
"Blinding Flash Push!"
Two attacks, simultaneous, covering different angles, filling the approach with fire and light.
Noah's magic was ready.
"Heavenly God's Rupture."
The light cannon that came from his circle didn't look proportional to what it did. It crossed the gap and made contact with both attacks at the same instant, and there was no contest. The black flames folded. The light assault folded. Both of them came apart against the cannon's advance, and then it kept going, carrying everything it had absorbed and everything it still held, straight into the two of them.
The explosion that followed was not small.
The shockwave went in every direction at once, tearing through the already-compromised structures around the clearing, pushing walls that were still standing into walls that weren't. Smoke rose in columns thick enough to block the view entirely. The wind that came off the blast was strong enough that Ultear had to raise her hand in front of her face, eyes narrowed, just to see.
Behind Noah, Erza had already moved. She'd turned the moment she felt the pressure of the incoming shockwave, putting her back between it and the child in her arms, shielding the girl with her own body. She felt the wind hit her back and held her ground.
The pink-haired girl had gone completely still. The crying had stopped.
The smoke began to clear.
Ultear watched it settle and asked, without looking away from the direction of the blast: "Are they dead?"
"No." Noah lowered his hand. "I managed it. When I said I felt pressured, what I meant was that I was concerned about miscalibrating and killing them before we had a chance to get any information out of them. They're strong enough that I had to pay attention to the upper limit."
Erza and Ultear had no immediate response to this either.
The smoke finished clearing.
Both of them were in a crater where the ground had been. Zancrow was on his feet, barely. He was breathing hard, visibly injured across most of his body, clothes damaged, posture held together by something that was probably more stubbornness than anything else. He'd pushed his God Slayer flames out at full power in the final moment, and that had been enough to blunt the edge of the attack rather than absorb it. The difference between standing and not standing, but not by much.
Kawazu beside him had a different look entirely. His entire body was sheened with a metallic gray, catching what light remained in the area.
"Doll Material Change: Iron."
He'd shifted his body to steel in the last available instant, trading his remaining magic reserves for a physical conversion that had taken the impact on a different kind of surface. The tradeoff showed immediately. His magic power was gone, burned through completely, and the moment it ran out the transformation released. His legs buckled underneath him. One knee hit the ground. Sweat was running freely down his face, and his chest was heaving.
Noah looked at both of them at the bottom of the crater.
"Solid physical conditioning," he said, with genuine acknowledgment in it. "Good instincts on the magic. And my force calibration held. Good result all around."
Ultear looked at the two broken figures in the pit, then at Noah, then back at the pit.
"What do we do with them now?"
"Restrain them first, then check if there are any more survivors." He started walking toward the crater. "There might still be someone alive in the wreckage."
From the bottom of the pit, voice cracked and raw, Zancrow heard every word of this exchange.
The laughter that came out of him was a different texture than before. Angry. Disbelieving. Somewhere past the point where normal reactions applied.
"HAHA, cough, cough, HAHAHA." He spat something and kept going. "You want to take us alive? You think you can just capture us? Who exactly do you think you are to even try something like that!"
Noah looked down at him from the rim of the crater.
"Someone who is about to do exactly that," he said. "Try to keep still. This will go faster if you cooperate."
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